They say is comes to them from a supplier from the Midwest who supplies fully cooked pork belly to restaurants...that is why so many restaurants are featuring pork belly now; getting it fully cooked and doing the final prep in-house. Has anyone tried this product from Trader Joe's? I have heard a lot about pork belly but never have tried it. What are your favorite ways to use it?

I had one of the best preparations of pork belly I've tried at The Playground last night. Lots of meat, somewhat like what you get from a really really good piece of chicharron. The former sous chef, Eddie Perez, at Ink in LA served it to us as one of his 13 courses to the lucky 17 of us eating in the Playground 2.0 theater kitchen (http://playgrounddtsa.com/2-0-calendar/).

He slow roasted it for four hours, then put a sear in a reduction sauce before he plated.. and served it with a banana "polenta" (see the pic below).

Pork belly is a common ingredient in Chinese cuisine. Two popular dishes that spring to mind are red-cooked pork (hong shao rou) and Sichuan twice-cooked pork (hui guo rou). The latter appears on lots of Chinese restaurant menus in the USA, but usually made with a leaner cut of pork than the traditional pork belly.